Natural Language (NL) and its use are daily matters for every human being. Linguistics, the study of NL, is a well-established discipline. Machine Translation (MT), the use of computer to translate texts between NLs, has been researched from decades soon after the birth of computer. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), the use of computer to communicate especially for persons with disabilities, has also been researched for several decades.
Right after the start of MT research, proposals and discussions were made for an Interlingua Method (IM) of MT. An interlingua is an artificial language that usually acts as an intermediary language in machine translation—where, instead of translating one language to another directly, a translation is first done to the intermediary language and then from the intermediary language to the target language. The interlingua usually attempts to capture meaning or semantic information, and such interlingua is called a semantic interlingua. For a brief discussion of a picture-based semantic interlingua, reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 8,712,780 to Ajit Narayanan. (Dec. 8, 2010), entitled “Systems and methods for picture based communication”.
As a picture-based interlingua is arguably easier to learn and manipulate than the NLs for persons who do not know the NL fluently, and as the interlingua can be converted technically into the NL, many different systems and methods are proposed to convert the interlingua into the NL. These find applications in language learning and in AAC.